You know the people in Dave Housley's stories. They're the neighbors down the street or the weirdos at the bus stop. Their exterior lives are as recognizable as the hook to a Tom Petty song, as well drawn as a gatefold LP. But it's in portraying the interior lives of these characters that Dave Housley's collection of short stories and essays, If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home, most excels--where appearances might be familiar, the humans at their center are intricate, flawed and multifaceted, seeking salvation or something like it in the bands and songs they love most.
The rudder that steers Housley (Commercial Fiction) from one story to the next is his penchant for voice, for thoroughly inhabiting the mind and speech of characters as disparate as Gene Simmons impersonators and teen-girl Black Sabbath fans. Like the others, the second story in the collection, "The Jerry Garcia Finger," opens explosively: "Everything was going to sh*t. I needed a change. I decided to buy a car." From there, the reader rides along in the rickety Dodge Charger, throttling toward a strip club and regrettable choices at high RPMs. Amid the adventures and mishaps, Housley laces these pieces with humor, most remarkably in "Death and the Wiggles," in which a father takes his drunk lawyer friend and his wide-eyed son to a concert for toddlers.
Beneath the veneer of a hit single, an earworm you can't help but sing, there's often a mastermind at work. So it is, too, with these sharp and winsome stories. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer